New Feature: Automatic follow-up emails until you get a reply [Updated 2018]

The original email plus the automatic follow-ups that were sent 1 day, and 5 days after.

Overview:

We just launched a powerful feature and the only of its kind integrated completely with Gmail. You can now set automatic follow-up email campaigns to be sent after an email campaign is sent, to dramatically increase your response rates. Reminders will be sent to your recipients in stages, until you get a reply (or an open or click).

An example: you send an email campaign to 100 warm leads from a trade show offering to set up a demo of your product. When you send that campaign, you set it so that two days later, a reminder is sent to anyone that hasn’t replied, and three days after that, another reminder is sent, and a few days after that, a final email is sent asking for a reply.

It’s easy to use, and you can try it right now using the standard follow-up language we’ve come up with. Just check the box next to each “stage” you want sent, make any adjustments to the timing and language, and hit the GMass button to send.

The GMass Settings box, where you can configure auto follow-ups.

Important points to know

You can use this feature for both mass emails and individual emails. If you’ve been using another Gmail tool, like Rebump, for follow-ups to your individual personal emails, you can eliminate that tool and use GMass instead.

You can choose whether the automatic follow-up is based on recipients opening or replying or clicking. If you choose “Didn’t Open” as your follow-up action, fewer follow-ups will be sent, because you will almost always have more Opens than you will Replies. If you choose “Didn’t Reply” as your action, more follow-ups will be sent.

Use the power of this feature sparingly. You likely don’t want to configure auto follow-ups with every campaign you send. This will cause your recipients to get additional emails from you, and you should only use this feature on emails to people where you genuinely want a reply.

If you want your auto follow-up messages to include more than just plain text, you can add rich text the message to your follow-up emails. This is done by creating the auto follow-up message in the Gmail Compose window and saving it to your account, and then selecting “Send custom message…” and choosing the message from the dropdown menu.

You can also personalize the auto follow-up email with personalization variables, as shown in the screenshot below.

You can use personalization tags inside an auto follow-up message. You will need to type them manually or copy/paste them. The normal personalization buttons only work in the Gmail Compose area.

After you’ve launched a campaign with automatic follow-ups, you can edit or cancel the auto follow-up settings. Here you can also add auto follow-ups to a campaign after the fact if you forgot to do so when you originally sent it, but be careful. Changing the settings to an already-sent campaign can trigger an immediate batch of reminder emails to be sent, if you’re not careful with the settings. If you change your mind and now wish to prevent auto follow-ups from sending, just set the “Days” to 0 for any particular Stage.

You can use this feature with or without Google Sheets. If you use it with Google Sheets you can personalize your emails based on much more than just First and Last Name.

If you’re setting auto follow-ups based on replies, you can toggle a domain-match setting such that if anybody at a domain responds, all future follow-ups to everybody at the same domain will stop. See the auto follow-up domain match setting doc for more information.

How the timing works

The timing of the reminder emails is based on the time that each individual email of a campaign was sent, not when the campaign was launched. Example scenarios:

The Days for each Stage are based on the time the original email is sent, not when the prior Stage is sent. For example, if Stage 1=2 Days, and Stage 2=5 Days, then Stage 1 will send 2 days after the original email, and Stage 2 will send 5 days after the original email, not 5 days after Stage 1 is sent.

If you create your campaign on Monday, but schedule it to be sent on Wednesday with the first stage follow-up sending two days later, then the first follow-up to the non-responder will be sent two days from Wednesday, meaning Friday.

If you create a campaign on Monday and use the “spread out” feature to send 100 emails/day for three days, and you include a Stage 1 follow-up going 2 days later, then each non-responder will get his first follow-up two days after his original email. So for the 100 emails on Monday, the follow-ups will be sent Wednesday. For the 100 emails sent on Tuesday, the follow-ups will be sent Thursday, and so on.

If you use the “Just create drafts” option on your campaign on a Monday, but then wait to click the link to have the drafts sent until Tuesday, the timing of the automatic follow-ups will be based on Tuesday because that is when the Drafts were sent.

If you enable the Skip Weekends option, then an auto follow-up will never get sent on a weekend, and the different Stage setting for Days become business days, not all days. Monday through Friday are business days. For example, if your original campaign sends on Wednesday and has a Stage 1 follow-up set to 7 days, and you enable Skip Weekends, then the Stage 1 follow-up will send 9 days later on the following Friday, since that Friday is 7 business days after that Wednesday.

What counts as a reply?

GMass detects replies to an outreach campaign fairly accurately but isn’t 100% perfect. Generally speaking, an email is only counted as a reply if it’s a legitimate reply from a person and not a bounce or an out-of-office auto reply. An email has a much higher chance of being counted as a reply if it appears as a reply to the same conversation thread in Gmail. Out-of-office auto-replies usually arrive as part of a separate thread, and not part of the original thread, so this is what prevents them from being counted a a reply.

What you see, and what your recipient sees

Your recipient will see your follow-up emails on top of the original and part of the same conversational thread.

You will see the follow-up emails as part of the same email thread in your Sent Mail folder, and each consecutive reminder will include the original and any previous reminders below.

The idea is that a follow-up email looks just like if you had found the original email from your Sent Mail, hit Reply, and then typed a new email on top and hit Send.

Reports

You will get email marketing reports on each follow-up stage just like you would any other mail merge campaign. The follow-up campaigns that are sent to non-responders will be labeled slightly differently so you an easily identify a regular email campaign versus an automatically sent follow-up email campaign.

Beware of these dangers

The sending of auto follow-up emails is dependent upon certain factors, like being able to locate the original “sent” email in your Gmail account. Beware of these dangers which can lead to auto follow-up mishaps:

Do not delete the original campaign from GMass Reports –> Sent Copies.
Doing so will prevent your auto follow-up emails from sending, because GMass relies on finding the original campaign to construct the auto follow-up.

Do not delete the individual sent emails from your Sent Mail folder.
Doing so will also prevent auto follow-up emails from sending, because GMass won’t be able to find the original sent email to add the follow-up on top of.

Do not add the “GMass Reports –> Replies” Label manually when replies to your campaign arrive in your Inbox.
GMass will automatically apply this Label to replies. If you manually apply this Label, GMass will skip the message and be unaware of the reply, and then an auto follow-up will go out to someone that has already replied.

Wait did this and it showed everyone on the email chain? I added my email on the mass email and when I opened it, it shows all other 48 people? Also, when I added some personalized fields, it did not pull them but just kept the {Address} field in the email?????

All those indicates that you clicked on the Gmail send button instead of the red GMass button. When you click the Gmail send button it sends your emails as is to everyone at once, but clicking the red GMass button will use the mail merge and personalization used in your spreadsheet to each one individually.

I added a followup today to a campaign I already sent. I set the days to 3 days after, and today is 4 days after my campaign, but I haven't seen any saved copy of the email sent and I haven't seen any reports about it. I originally sent my campaign at 2:47 pm. Will the followups send at the same time?thanks – wondering if my emails were sent or not.

I have sent out some emails using GMass and had selected the follow ups to happen after 3, 5 and 7 days (emails were sent out on the 28th). No follow ups have been sent that I can tell even though everything I look at makes it look like they are set to go. Not really sure what went wrong.

Hello. Question on the Automatic Follow up Feature. Stage one happens X days after the message was sent, Stage two reads after X days if "no reply"…is this X days after the initial send date or X days after stage one kicks in? Thanks for the help. Love Gmass!

The Auto Follow-ups automatically populate with whatever you used on your last campaign. It will not affect your previous campaign if you change that message for a new campaign. They are pre-filled for your convenience.

in the automatic reply field, I don’t see a way for me to change the subject title for each follow up custom message. Why is this? I also notice you don’t allow for pictures to be added as you would allow on the first email going out? Am I missing something? Do you have a feature that allows me to do this that I’m not seeing?

If the campaign is still in progress, then you can set Auto Followups by opening the draft in the GMass Scheduled label, setting the Auto Followups in the GMass Settings Box, and clicking the GMass button to save.

If my original email is sent on Tuesday, my follow up is sent two days later which would be Thursday…what about the second follow-up? Is the number of days from the original email or my follow-up email?

Example:

Originial email: Tuesday
First follow-up email: Thursday ( 2 days )
Second follow-up: Following Monday ( So four days from the first follow-up or six days from the original email?)

Hi, I just wanted to check-in on the questions of John on the 4th of April:

Hello,

Regarding timing of the emails.

If my original email is sent on Tuesday, my follow up is sent two days later which would be Thursday…what about the second follow-up? Is the number of days from the original email or my follow-up email?

Example:
Original email: Tuesday
First follow-up email: Thursday ( 2 days )
Second follow-up: Following Monday ( So four days from the first follow-up or six days from the original email?)

If I set up an automatic follow up for a campaign with a customized email message. Then I start a 2nd campaign to different recipients. When I look at automatic follow up, the email text for the 1st campaign is listed there. If I change it, will I change the text for the 1st campaign? So the question is can you have different auto follow ups going at the same time?

I’m using Gmass but not a Google Sheet. I’m directing my email to one individual (To Line), but copying two or three others (cc Line).

Ideally, if anyone of them replied, the campaign would stop. However, the entire district uses the domain so I can’t apply the feature that causes them to stop when one individual with a domain replies.

If one of the CC’d people responds will my campaign stop? This is my desire.

Suppose, I have sent the campaign email to a single person for two different campaigns (for example Mr.Jon Emailed for “Sub1” and “Sub2” 2 different campaigns). The moment I schedule an auto follow-up and send it. It doesn’t deliver correctly to the person. Eg., I want to send follow-ups for Sub1 and I have pitched Mr.Jon for both sub1 & sub2. The follow-ups are going in the wrong subject line.

It goes in the wrong email thread thereby creating a lot of havoc.

I hope it helps in understanding. A quick response will be highly appreciated.!
Please help!

Please contact our support team through http://gmass.co/g/support so that we may assist you directly. Please include screenshots of the wrong replies being attached to the wrong email thread so we can help get this resolved.

Does it work even if they have a system where they have a ticket opened say like for example ZENDESK they send you a separate email “Ticket has been created” and he answers the question but the reply will not be within the thread of the email conversation but in a separate email, how does that work?

Hi,
Does anyone know why, after I finish configuring all the followup messages (i.e. only 3), I cant get back to the top of the gmass configuration popup window to see the personalization options and such. The top of the popup window remains permanently out of view towards the top of my screen and nothing I do will allow the popup screen to move down to the point where I can see the top of it. Thanks

“It’s easy to use, and you can try it right now using the standard follow-up language we’ve come up with. Just check the box next to each “stage” you want sent, make any adjustments to the timing and language, and hit the GMass button to send”.- HOW?

Please show Step By Step how/what to Click first in the message Compose box

One obvious question is “Does a follow-up email count towards the 50 emails/day max limit for a free account?” i.e. if I send out 50 emails each day for several days but they all have auto followups every 2 days, will the number of emails GMass can send / day reduce due to the auto follow-up emails.